


Teeth Ready for Sinking

by vargrimar



Series: The Chambers and the Valves [13]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Autistic Sherlock Holmes, Banter, Canon Compliant, Drug Use, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Falling In Love, Hospitalisation, Hospitals, Jealousy, M/M, Missing Scene, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 03, but also in a hospital, but in a hospital, hey look they have a scene together again it's about time, i swear to god johnlock is endgame it's just taking them a while
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:09:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22901491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargrimar/pseuds/vargrimar
Summary: A beat passes, and then the familiar headrush closes in with dizzying speed. He lets it careen into him like the crush of a wave, tangling him down below the surface in a blissful sort of struggle. The agony at his lower ribs does not subside, but it dwindles considerably amidst the cottony buzz.“The sooner we can start planning,” says Sherlock, gazing up at the too-white ceiling, “the better off we’ll be.”
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: The Chambers and the Valves [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640680
Comments: 1
Kudos: 35





	Teeth Ready for Sinking

**Author's Note:**

> ( limbs lost to a dead-weight stake  
> skull cage like a prison  
> and he’s lost faith he’ll ever see again )

“How are you feeling?”

Blearily, Sherlock opens his eyes and takes in his surroundings.

White ceiling, white sheets, heart monitor, IV. Half-shuttered blinds block out the sun’s glare through the room’s expansive windows and a generous chill from the air conditioning breezes across his face. A pleasurable fuzziness ameliorates the edges of the blade punctured through his ribs; it lets his muddled thoughts drift and coast, light yet sluggish and with resistance, as if they were somehow wading through a body of water.

He really must stop waking up in hospitals.

“Sherlock? How are—”

“Like I’ve been shot,” he rasps.

A quiet chuckle. “Getting shot’ll do that, yeah.”

Squinting in the light, Sherlock turns his head upon the pillow. John stares back from a chair situated to the right of his hospital bed. He is settled in, arms folded, legs crossed. The steely corundum of his eyes is a bit darker in the filtered sunlight, but it complements the tartan navies of his shirt. The lineaments of his face are stark, a little rigid, his forehead knit into creases.

Sherlock blinks, dazed. “John? Why are you here?”

“I’m here because my best friend got shot.” John uncrosses his legs and leans forward in his chair, hands laced. “You were out a while.”

“No, never mind that. Why are you _here_?” God, his throat is dry. He needs water. Sherlock coughs on reflex, and then an overwhelming pain lances through his sternum, bright and fiery and intense, enough to cloud his vision, and—oh, this is _hell_.

John’s countenance turns sharp. “You okay?”

“Yes,” he manages. And then, “No.” Sherlock taps his neck.

“Right. Okay. Hang on.” John leans over in his periphery and grabs hold of something. “If I lift the bed, will it be too much?”

“Maybe,” says Sherlock, but he couldn’t care less.

John elevates it with a long press on the remote. The process is not quite as painful as the coughing. When it reaches an incline of about sixty degrees, John lets the remote down and dips closer with a plastic cup filled with water. He holds it out to Sherlock, and Sherlock snatches it up and gulps it down in three quick swallows.

The liquid is a cold salve. He exhales his relief and leans back into his pillow. Better.

“They’ve locked the windows this time. I wonder if you’re the only patient they’ve done that for.” John huffs a soft laugh as he takes the empty cup and tosses it in the nearby bin. “Did you really climb all the way down to the pavement? The window was open when Lestrade and I came by. You did, didn’t you?”

Sherlock can’t help but smile. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“No, of course it wouldn’t be the first time. Of course it wouldn’t. Christ.” John runs a hand through his hair, lowering himself back into the chair. “You were shot. You were shot, and not only did you climb out a window, you climbed down two bloody storeys.”

“And took a cab.”

“Right. And took a cab. And God only knows what else.”

“It was necessary.”

John tilts his head, expression tight. “Was it?”

Sherlock ignores the question and instead glances down at the gauze set along the bottom of his ribcage. The tape is fresh, he notes. No longer peeling from sweat or exertion. No red or pink in the material, either; no massive bleeding. The dressing must have been changed at some point between his collapse at Baker Street and his admission here. He doesn’t remember pulling any stitches in the midst of things, but that means very little. The morphine had run out far sooner than he’d anticipated, which meant enduring a great deal more than he’d been equipped to manage.

Ah, well. No matter. Everything is all right now.

Well. Mostly.

He turns his attention back to John. The data before him now is much clearer than it had been a minute ago. John’s posture is stiff; his shoulders press against the chair’s cushioned back, albeit uncomfortably. He must have been sitting there for quite some time, Sherlock thinks. Several hours at the very least. Exhaustion brackets his eyes, subtle yet present. John is also dishevelled, but not terribly so: ruffled hair, wrinkled shirt, a day’s growth of blond-auburn stubble.

Sherlock knows he prefers a clean-shaven face, which puts John’s last visit to his flat sometime yesterday. Late morning, most likely. However, that does not quite explain both the facial hair and his presence here.

Hospitals have visiting hours, don’t they? He couldn’t have stayed the night. They would have kicked John out, and Sherlock is certain Mycroft is just the right amount of exasperated where he wouldn’t have let the staff overlook an errant John Watson meandering their patient floors after hours. So why the stubble? John went home; he should have shaved, unless—

Oh, he thinks. _Oh_.

Unshaven, rumpled clothes, cleaned teeth, hair washed but not combed.

Hotel.

John never went home.

“John,” he says, pitching his voice to a low murmur, “why are you here?”

Stormy gaze now preoccupied with the decidedly interesting pattern of the floor tile, John flexes his hands on his knees. “I’ve already told you: my best friend got shot. And after he got shot, he decided to break out of his bloody hospital room for a dramatic unveiling—because that’s what he does, this best friend of mine; he’s a sodding lunatic—causing himself a minor episode of cardiac arrest and no small amount of internal bleeding because he was recovering from a _gunshot wound_ , which has since landed him back in hospital. So, here I am. Visiting him. The cock.”

Sherlock flattens his hands together, the pressure wonderfully grounding. “As appreciated as your company is in the midst of what is sure to otherwise be a very dull and irritating stay,” he says, “that is not what I’m asking.”

John breathes and scrubs his fingers around his mouth. Judging by the way he looks at everything but the hospital bed, he clearly wants to avoid this particular conversation, but he must know by now there is very little he can hide from Sherlock.

“She’s… home,” says John. “At the flat. Doing only God knows what; I haven’t been round. And I’ve—I’m still—” He sets his jaw, drawing another harsh inhale through his nose. “I’m not ready to face that. Not yet. So I came here. Because, yeah, you pretended to be dead for two years without a word as best friends are wont to do, but you also haven’t lied to me about your entire past since the day we met, and that’s… well. That’s something.”

Quiet begins to nest between the blades of slanted sunshine. The hum of the hospital room’s air conditioning pours in right beside it, slow and gradual, the steady cadence of John’s breathing layered over top. A foreign weight has somehow invaded the air between them, separate and wholly different from the muted but persevering pang. It is something Sherlock can feel tightening in the space below his throat, a heavy coil twisting amongst itself beneath his skin.

He wants to ask John if he’s okay (because that’s normal, that’s natural; in the aftermath, that is what they do), but this is a delicate thing and Sherlock already knows the answer. John’s body language is rich in its own unique diction; everything is plain by the look on his face, the incline of his body, the continuous clench-release of his hands. John is not okay and hasn’t been okay since he learnt of Mary’s previous life. John is furious beneath the surface. He is furious, livid, angry, _betrayed_ , and he has every right to be. That is why he’s here.

And because Sherlock is in hospital with an IV in the crook of his arm and morphine numbing his nerves, there is no distraction he can provide. If this were any other situation, Sherlock would sweep him up in a whirlwind and bring him on a case because that is the fix they both crave: danger and adrenal highs amalgamated with the irresistible elements of mystery and allure. It combats both boredom and the encroaching presence of intrusive thoughts, the latter of which John presently suffers from, and Sherlock can offer him no relief because John’s own wife saw fit to incapacitate him by means of a surgical bullet.

Not that he blames Mary. Well, yes, he does blame Mary (because she _did_ shoot him, damn her), but he does not blame her entirely. If he examines the circumstances through her eyes, complicated as they are, there was little else she could have done. Not if she’d wanted to keep things intact. She is a liar and an (ex?-)intelligence agent and a great many other things, but she is also sentimental. She could have killed Sherlock in that office, but she didn’t. She also could have left him to bleed out, but she didn’t. Even if it was only out of love for John, she let Sherlock live, and that is something he must consider.

He just wishes it hadn’t come to this. He does not like being confined to a hospital bed. He does not like watching John muddle through himself. He does not like not knowing what to say.

Because, really, what does one say at a time like this? “Please accept my heartfelt apologies that your wife lied to you the entire time you knew her and not only lied about anything and everything but also held a profession in assassination until about six years ago; do chin up”?

Whilst in the heat of it at Baker Street, he’d had much more control over the situation because 221B is his territory, his domain, and getting to the bottom of Mary Watson’s connection to Magnussen had been paramount, but now that he has once again been forced into the tiresome clutches of hospital staff and suddenly presented with the knowledge that John did not go home in favour of a hotel, he finds himself at a loss.

Mary should have come forward, he thinks. He knows why she didn’t (selfishness; he knows it very well), but it would have been better for everyone if she had. All of this could have been avoided if she’d just _told_ him.

“I haven’t looked at the memory stick,” says John.

Sherlock glances to him. “No?”

“No. And I don’t—I don’t know if I should. She said I won’t love her afterward. That means the worst, doesn’t it? She’s killed people, clearly, but ‘you won’t love me when you’ve finished’, that’s—that’s something worse.”

“It might be,” admits Sherlock. “I can’t speculate with complete accuracy, not with how little we know. But it’s clear she’s on the run, which would imply her previous life as an intelligence agent had something of a sinister element. It could be worse, yes. Or it could simply be typical work of the trade. Not a lighthearted set of information in either case.”

John leans back into the chair. “Jesus.”

“She gave you that memory stick for a reason. If it does indeed contain everything about who she was, then you essentially hold another key toward her incarceration in your pocket. She trusts you, John. Both now and with whatever happened before.” Sherlock draws a painful breath. “Only you can make the decision to read it.”

“I know. I know it’s my decision. It’s just—” John’s fingers curl, uncurl, and curl again. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to… God, I don’t know. I don’t. I’ve had since last night and it’s not something I can just— _accept_. Not easily.”

“Yes, well. You’ve never been one for the easy path.”

“Yeah. Right. Of course. ‘Addicted to a certain lifestyle’.” John’s voice hews with an ireful edge. “How could I forget.”

Sherlock lets his eyes drift to the morphine drip. With his left hand, he reaches over and taps it up another three notches. A beat passes, and then the familiar headrush closes in with dizzying speed. He lets it careen into him like the crush of a wave, tangling him down below the surface in a blissful sort of struggle. The agony at his lower ribs does not subside, but it dwindles considerably amidst the cottony buzz.

“The sooner we can start planning,” says Sherlock, gazing up at the too-white ceiling, “the better off we’ll be.”

“What? Planning? Seriously?” Anger alchemises into incredulity. “We haven’t even decided if we’re going to take her case!”

“We _are_ going to take her case. She’s your wife and she saved my life. Taking her case is in everyone’s best interest.”

“Sherlock, she—”

“Listen to me. It doesn’t matter what state the two of you are in. The events of last night or whenever it was are completely irrelevant compared to Magnussen. Magnussen will wait because he’s got the upper hand, but we can’t count on that forever. Eventually he’ll make his move. We must be prepared.” He levels John with a hard stare, although it is becoming more and more difficult to keep focus. “Mary Watson is our client now. She doesn’t need to be more than a client, not until you’re ready, but her status as client remains. We will brave the shark, extract her documents, and return them to her. That is what we do.”

John stares back, tension cording his shoulders. Despite the discomfort of the past several hours, he still looks every bit the stoic soldier: stern countenance, solid posture, straightened spine. This is the man who has been to war, who has tasted blood, who has seen horrors. This is the man who has protected others by placing himself in harm’s way. This is the man who once killed a murderous cabbie for a person he had known for barely forty-eight hours.

This is the man who carries Sherlock’s heart.

A sharpness echoes beside his lungs, as if to somehow emphasise just how bereft he has become, but Sherlock fixes his hands together and maintains the marble. John is not okay, but this is the first step toward becoming okay, which, with luck, will be a step toward becoming happy. This ordeal has shattered John’s perception as much as it has shattered Sherlock’s, and he must do his part in getting things sorted.

Because reconciliation is best. It is. He knows it is. As much as the emptiness in him protests, as much as the hamstrung jealousy howls, it is the best course of action for all parties involved.

The Watsons will endure. They will. He’ll make sure of it.

“All right,” says John. It is quiet, calm, but not without a tendril of heat. “All right. Okay. Fine. We’ll take her case. We’ll take her case even though she lied and shot you and put you here. She’s our client. And because she’s our client, we’ll do whatever’s necessary. Just like all the rest. Because that’s what we do.” He clears his throat. “Right, then. So. What’s the plan?”

Sherlock breathes, drifts on morphine, and lies.


End file.
